Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Standard
interpretation
( ha)
Dialectal interpretation
da
ba(/)
min
anw
at-tasult
Original form
1
wa(/i)l-istirbt
( allat)
ill
( tarid)
bi-tiwrid
al(/a)
bl
HB register the verb itsil but, of course, not a madar tasul (whose form is clearly
standard).
A different path has been convincingly argued for by Hary (1996), who advocates
the possibility of a unified grammatical description of Arabic as used by speakers in a
variety of contexts. The pedagogical feasibility of such an approach has been
practically shown by Ryding (1990), Ryding & Mehall (2005).
Our approach pushes this idea forward by devising a formal grammar of informal
Arabic which generates both standard and spoken forms, possibly with specific usage
markers. The model proposed is within the framework of Combinatory Categorial
Grammar (Steedman, 1996, 2000; Steedman & Baldridge, 2011), according to lines
developed by Lancioni (2014). The paper will present a sketch of a formal grammar
which is able to generate a number of real sentences attested in a corpus of Egyptian
informal texts.
References
Hary, Benjamin (1996). The Importance of the Language Continuum in Arabic
Multiglossia. In: A. Elgibali (Ed.). Understanding Arabic. Cairo: The American
University in Cairo Press, 69-90.
Lancioni, Giuliano (2014). VS/SV Order in Spoken Arabic: a Categorial Grammar
Account. In: O.Durand et al. (Eds.). Alf laha wa laha. Wien/Berlin: LIT, 225236.
Ryding, K.C. (1990). Formal Spoken Arabic: Basic Course. Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press.
Ryding, K.C. & D.J. Mehall (2005) Formal spoken Arabic: Basic course. 2nd Ed.
Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Steedman, Mark (1996). Surface Structure and Interpretation (Linguistic Inquiry
Monographs, 30), Boston, MA: MIT Press.
Steedman, Mark (2000). The Syntactic Process. Boston, MA: MIT Press.
Steedman, Mark and Jason Baldridge (2011). Combinatory Categorial Grammar. In:
R.D. Borsley & K. Brjars (Eds.). Non-Transformational Syntax: Formal and
Explicit Models of Grammar, Malden,MA/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 181224.